2020 Hyundai Kona, Santa Fe and Tucson get 5-star safety ratings

Hyundai is adding more hardware to its trophy cabinet for safety ratings after the 2020 versions of three of its hot-selling crossovers — the Kona, Santa Fe and the Tucson — all received 5-Star Overall Safety Ratings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The news adds to last week's announcement that the Korean automaker's Nexo SUV earned a Top Safety Pick + award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety as the first production fuel-cell vehicle tested by the group. The three 2020 model-year vehicles are all largely unchanged from the 2019 versions, each of which received the Top Safety Pick + designation from IIHS as well.

Both the Kona and the larger Tucson aced NHTSA's frontal and side-crash tests and earned four out of five stars for rollover crash protection. The Santa Fe earned five stars on side crash tests and four of five stars for frontal crashes and rollovers.

In addition to their structural crashworthiness, the three utility vehicles benefit from Hyundai's SmartSense package of safety technologies. They include forward collision-avoidance assist, which fuses radar, a front-facing camera and autonomous braking; lane keeping assist; driver attention warning, which detects drowsiness or inattentiveness on the part of the driver; blind-spot collision warning; and rear cross-traffic warning. Hyundai recently announced its intention to equip all U.S. models starting in 2022 with a rear occupant alert system, which detects when a rear door was opened or closed before the car is started and reminds the driver to "check the rear seat" on the center cluster.